LISTEN No-one could have imagined the hand dealt to cities this year.
Images of vacant major cities where we wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen tumbleweed blowing across streets flooded the internet. Wildlife took over. People, business and the hustle and bustle disappeared. The rulebook on what a city is was torn up.
That was cities during the pandemic. But what will cities look like and how will they operate in a post-pandemic world? Will the hustle and bustle come back as quickly as it disappeared, or have cities changed forever?
In the third of EG’s four-part series looking at the lessons learnt from the forced changes we have all had to make during the coronavirus pandemic, EG editor Samantha McClary chats to Sophie Chick, director of World Research at Savills, Henry Pelly, senior sustainability consultant at Max Fordham, Andrew Rich, fund manager at Nuveen, and Susan Samuel, real estate partner at DLA Piper, about what a re-imagination of our cities will look like and what city investors, developers, dwellers and workers have learnt from this most unexpected of years.
Listen to the other podcasts in this series:
Tales of the Unexpected: What 2020 has taught us about digitisation and data
Tales of the Unexpected: Why ESG has moved up, not down, the corporate agenda
Tales of the Unexpected: How distance brought us closer together
